IT Infrastructure Architecture Blog

Sjaak Laan's vision on infrastructure architecture

Google outage

Today I read this message on the Google site. I found it quite frightening.

The Gmail service today was not reachable for about 90 minutes. Although this can happen to any service I was triggered by the phrase "worldwide outage" in some of the news articles about it. Gmail is used worldwide by an enormous amount of people. Downtime affects users around the globe. This is something new.

When infrastructures fail it is usually a local problem. Electrical power can be down, networks can fail, but it usually affects only a relatively small group of people. Even if a complete datacenter would fail (for instance because of a failure in the air conditioning system) normally only the local customers of the data center would be affected. A world wide infrastructure failure is something new and something we should be prepared for to happen more in the future. The more we get dependent on cloud services like the Google infrastructure (search, mail, office applications, etc) the more vulnerable we are. And not only we, but millions users worldwide.